National law firm Mills Oakley has partnered with Collective Campus to find entrepreneurs working on concepts for new technologies or processes that will improve the way the firm operates or delivers its services.

Allens Accelerate has released a due diligence checklist to help startups through the capital raise process, covering everything from corporate registration and financing documentation to intellectual property.

Lawyers in pop culture are often stereotyped as smug and greedy, stretching out cases for as long as possible to get as much money as they can. But in the real world lawyers, just like many other professionals, are looking to work as efficiently as possible, and are doing so by completing more work online for fixed fees.

Over the last few years as our startup ecosystem has grown, it has become common practice for startups facing financial constraints to ‘offer’ unpaid internship opportunities to more often than not younger aged people. A lot of the time these ‘internships’ are built on the hope that it will lead to a paid job in the company, or at the very least give the incumbent ‘free worker’ some really great exposure on what it is really like to work at a startup.

StartupAUS, an Australian non-for-profit body representing the interests of and advocating for the startup community, has made the Allens Accelerate A-Suite available through its website. The suite is comprised of 14 open-sourced legal documents packed into four bundles: Corporate, Employment, IP & NDA, and Privacy & Website.

The legal industry is famous for its traditions and formality and, as a result, doesn’t exactly have a reputation for innovation. Of course, there a handful of legal professionals working in the background trying to change the way things are done. The last few years have seen new firms arise looking to provide people with greater access to legal services than traditional firms, which bill by the hour at prices unaffordable for the majority.

With the Government now inching ever closer to relaxing certain rules which currently restrict startups from issuing equity to crowdfunding investors (equity-based funding) and the mooted rise of peer-to-peer and peer-to-business lending platforms (debt-based funding), crowdfunding options in Australia may be about to increase dramatically.

Although there were varying opinions on the open-sourced legal document templates created by Australian VCs, most lawyers agreed that the terms presented in the templates are more appealing to investors than startup founders, and that startup founders should seek legal advice and negotiate important amendments.

Australian venture capital firms, angel groups, incubators, accelerators and other industry stakeholders have pledged to open source the legal documents used in their seed fundraising processes. Industry-wide standardised fundraising documents can now be downloaded via AVCAL’s website and used during early-stage equity investment rounds.